Gretel Adorno, Walter Benjamin

The correspondence between Gretel Adorno and Walter Benjamin began in 1930, but only after Benjamin’s emigration to France did it reach its full intensity, standing not only as a testament to the intellectual Berlin of the twenties, but also as a document of a great friendship that existed independently of the relationship between Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno.

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Theodor W. Adorno, Gershom Scholem

»I really like him and we find that we have an awful lot to say to each other« Gershom Scholem wrote to Walter Benjamin in 1938. With »he« Scholem meant Theodor W. Adorno, the man whom Scholem had recently met in New York. It was to be the beginning of a 30-year-long amicable and intellectual relationship as well as the prelude to a correspondence of more than 200 letters, which impressively documents an entire epoch of German-Jewish intellectual history and is for the first time being published in its entirety.

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English world rights (Polity), Spanish world rights (Eterna Cadencia)

Ingeborg Bachmann

The present volume for the first time compiles the war diary Ingeborg Bachmann kept from late summer 1944 to June 1945, as well as the surviving letters from Jack Hamesh – a unique document of dialogue between the children of the victims and the perpetrators.

Jurek Becker

Over the course of his life as a writer Jurek Becker has explored many genres. He wrote texts for the cabaret, authored movie scripts, garnered international acclaim with his debut novel Jacob the Liar, published short stories and essays. In his estate drafts were found for most of his works. Among these, drafts for postcards were discovered as well, in which he used the same conceptual approach as he did in his prose works. The number of postcards, which Becker primarily wrote towards the end of his life, shows that his aim in writing them was to bring a moment of joy to friends or family members. Messages of the author about himself were of secondary importance. First and foremost, Jurek Becker was concerned with entertaining the reader for a few minutes. Increasingly, the postcard became the textual form in which the author enjoyed expressing himself. It was, after all, a form that allowed for word games and silliness – and that, on the other hand, off ered the possibility of showing affection without having to disclose too much information about himself.

Hans Blumenberg, Jacob Taubes

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Bertolt Brecht, Helene Weigel

»Dear Helli,
i’m learning: to wash glasses + cups, sweep the floor, take out the rubbish, make scram-bled eggs and soups. i’m teaching myself. i feel very close to you when i’m washing glasses, which you have done for so long, among other things.«

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Paul Celan, Gisèle Celan-Lestrange

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Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs

Here are the letters between Nelly Sachs (1891–1970), recipient of the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature, and the great German-speaking poet Paul Celan (1920–1970). Their correspondence lasted from 1954 until Celan's death by suicide. Sachs died the day Celan was buried.

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Sigrid Damm

Goethe’s letters to Charlotte von Stein are some of the most beautiful examples of world literature. They are intimate documents of Goethe’s first decade at Weimar, which, during his lifetime, was shrouded in silence.

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Gudrun Ensslin, Bernward Vesper

At the beginning of 1968, Gudrun Ensslin left Bernward Vesper and moved with her 7-month-old son Felix to Andreas Baader. Shortly thereafter, two department stores in Frankfurt burned; Baader, Ensslin and Thorwald Proll were arrested as suspected arsonists. Felix went with Vesper and the history of the Red Army Faction (RAF) began to take its course.

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Peter Handke, Siegfried Unseld

»I am happy to announce that after reading your manuscript closely, we have decided to pub-lish your work at Suhrkamp Verlag.« This letter in August 1965 was the start of a correspon-dence consisting of nearly 600 letters in which Peter Handke finally congratulated the pub-lisher on his 75th birthday.

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Hermann Hesse

This volume assembles the most important of Hermann Hesse’s letters in the years between 1905 and 1914. They show the by now married writer in the second and third decade of his life, at Lake Constance, in a village oblivious to the world, where he built a house for his family in 1907 and cultivates a large garden with abandon. But soon he becomes tired of this settled life, is drawn into the open, and so he is often on the road for months on end – on books tours across Germany, hiking in Italy and finally on an expedition to Indonesia. At the same time, the success of his early works has made him well known beyond the borders of Germany and an object of desire for publishers and editors.

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Hermann Hesse

Possibly no other time span saw so many changes in the life of the poet than the years between 1916 and 1923. Even though Hermann Hesse had already left the Germany of the last Emperor for good in 1912, he was still a citizen of this country at war and had to expect his draft to the front at any time. He escaped this fate by the founding of a relief centre for German prisoners of war in Bern and providing them with good books, but in order to do so, he had so sacrifice his poetic production almost entirely up until 1919.

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Hermann Hesse

The years between 1924 and 1932 once more show Hermann Hesse to be »a person of becoming and of change«. For him, they begin with the experiment of a new (yet short-lived) marriage. The effects of inflation in Germany and the hassle of the foreign exchange transfer in Switzerland concern him, the provider for three sons and their mother, on more than just an existential level. But it’s the political impacts of the currency devaluation that are just as apparent to him: they undermine the new democratic beginning and empower the revanchist forces in Germany, which, treated with contempt by the media, nevertheless court him on the occasion of his 50th birthday.

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Hermann Hesse

This collection of Hermann Hesse’s brilliant early letters conveys the both dramatic and fascinating journey full of obstacles of a gifted missionary’s son, destined for a theological career, who had already decided by the age of twelve that he would become »either a poet or nothing«.

Hg.: Antje Modersohn, Wolfgang Werner

When Paula Becker first meets the considerably older Otto Modersohn in 1899, she is a young, ambitious artist who wants to paint at any cost; he, on the contrary, has already had a name for quite some time, is one of the founders of the artists’ colony in Worpswede, and, on top of it all, married. Nonetheless, their mutual attraction is undeniable and one year later they are a couple. The first letters they exchange while Paula Becker is travelling between Berlin and Paris already bear witness to the great affection they felt for each other but also to their great connection in terms of artistic creation. Later, their written correspondence would continuously prove to be a means for them to discuss painting as well as the formulation of artistic goals. And, last but not least, they are full of anecdotes concerning their circles of friends in Worpswede as well as Paula Becker’s amusement over her marriage preparation course in Berlin.

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Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt

This first-time publication of the correspondence between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt is a unique contemporary historical document: a discussion on crucial questions of Jewish history and self-image after the Shoah led by two of the 20th century’s most significant thinkers of Jewish extraction.